Pornhub bans "non-consensual" AI-edited fake porn clips

Deepfakes are being purged from the internet

In the unlikely event that you’ve never heard of them, “deepfakes” is the term often used for AI-edited fake porn in where the face of an actress is digitally replaced by that of a Hollywood star. Deepfakes communities and clips have already been removed from Discord, Twitter, and GIF-hosting platform Gfycat. Now, the videos have been banned from Pornhub.

As was the case with Discord, Pornhub considers deepfakes videos to be non-consensual. The popular adult website, which gets over 75 million visitors every day, compared them to revenge porn and said it would ban the content from its service.

“We do not tolerate any nonconsensual content on the site and we remove all said content as soon as we are made aware of it," a spokesperson told Motherboard. "Nonconsensual content directly violates our TOS [terms of service] and consists of content such as revenge porn, deepfakes or anything published without a person’s consent or permission.”

Motherboard does note that it is still possible to find dozens of the fake porn vids on Pornhub by searching for the term “deepfakes” and a celebrity’s name. It’s thought that Pornhub might be relying on users to flag the videos so it can identify and remove them.

Gaming-focused chat service Discord shut down a deepfakes group late last month, while Gfycat said it was actively removing the videos from its platform. Yesterday, Twitter announced it would suspend any account it identified as the original poster of “intimate media that has been produced or distributed without the subject’s consent.”

While Reddit has removed some deepfakes content, the subreddit, which has over 91,000 subscribers, remains online. It warns against using the faces of minors and non-celebrities in the edited videos.